Does Human Touch Facilitate Object Categorization in 6-to-9-Month-Old Infants?

Girija Kadlaskar,Amanda Seidl,Sandra Waxman

doi:10.3390/brainsci10120940

Girija Kadlaskar, Amanda Seidl + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10120940

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Abstract

Infants form object categories in the first months of life. By 3 months and throughout the first year, successful categorization varies as a function of the acoustic information presented in conjunction with category members. Here we ask whether tactile information, delivered in conjunction with category members, also promotes categorization. Six- to 9-month-olds participated in an object categorization task in either a touch-cue or no-cue condition. For infants in the touch-cue condition, familiarization images were accompanied by precisely-timed light touches from their caregivers; infants in the no-cue condition saw the same images but received no touches. Only infants in the touch-cue condition formed categories. This provides the first evidence that touch may play a role in supporting infants’ object categorization.

Highlights

The way we categorize objects impacts how we perceive relationships among them [1,2,3].Without categorization, we would treat every entity we encounter as a unique individual
In order to examine whether any differences in visual attention to familiarization images were correlated with differences at test, we ran Pearson correlations between individual infants’ looking times during familiarization and their performance at test using
There was no correlation between infants’ looking times during familiarization and performance at test, r(27) = −0.01, p = 0.93. These results suggest that any differences in infants’ performance at test cannot be attributed to the amount of time spent looking at the images during familiarization

Summary

Introduction

The way we categorize objects impacts how we perceive relationships among them [1,2,3].Without categorization, we would treat every entity we encounter (e.g., every golden retriever) as a unique individual. The way we categorize objects impacts how we perceive relationships among them [1,2,3]. Categorization, is a fundamental cognitive process, and one that is especially important for young infants who encounter new objects, entities, and events every day. For infants as young as three months of age, object categorization is boosted when visual images of category members (e.g., dinosaurs) are presented in conjunction with human speech, but not when the same visual images are accompanied by other auditory signals, including backward speech and pure sine wave tone sequences [4,8,9,11,12,13]. Listening to human speech promotes object categorization in infants, in a way that listening to other well-matched non-speech auditory stimuli does not

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